Ah.

The games of yesteryear. Those games of groundbreaking innovation and glorious storytelling. Those games which required more imagination than videocard. Those games which inspire gratuitous amounts of nostalgia on those who played them.

Of course, some of those games are more deserving of nostalgia than others. Games like System Shock, Starcraft, Deus Ex, and Final Fantasy VII (if JRPGs are what you’re into …*shudder*) all earned their places in the history books through their respective areas of excellence.

Homeworld is one of those games, though not all of you will have heard of it. One of the first that I ever owned and played, it is forever seated in my memory as one of the greatest games ever made.

Homeworld is a real-time strategy space epic telling the story of a people exiled from their home planet by a devastatingly powerful empire. Millennia have passed since the exile, however, and knowledge of their origins has faded to nothing but the foggiest memories and legends. When an ancient map is found in the husk of a prehistoric starship that details a path through space back to their home, however, disparate tribes are united in an effort to take the stars and travel back to their home.

The journey is long and marked with innumerable battles against overwhelming odds. The story is told mostly through pre- and post-mission cut scenes, which, despite the lack of recognizable characters, manages to be engaging and emotionally involving in a way that few RTS games are.

Homeworld originally shipped with a 50ish-page book providing ridiculous amounts of detail into the back-story of the game — a classy touch that is rarely, if ever, seen today. The gameplay itself was groundbreaking for the time, being the first game to feature fully three-dimensional combat—a system which has never really been bettered, in my opinion, even by such recent efforts as Sins of a Solar Empire.

Homeworld is still available online, through the likes of Amazon and eBay (the Game of the Year edition, which includes the aforementioned handbook, is also available on Amazon), and I highly recommend it to any fan of science fiction or strategy games. The sequel, Homeworld: Cataclysm is also excellent, though the ‘true’ sequel, Homeworld 2, was a disappointment (truthfully the only disappointing game I can think of that the developer, Relic, has released).

I’ve waited long years for a game to be released that holds the same magic for me that Homeworld did, and though some games have come close, no other strategy game since then has really done it. Find it, buy it, play it. If you love it, let me know here. If you hate it, print this article off, light it on fire and stuff it up your left nostril.

Jerod Jarvis is an independent gaming journalist and founder of Duality Games. He maintains gaming columns for The Washington Times Communities and for The Outpost. When not blogging madly about games, he freelances for the Spokesman-Review in his hometown of Spokane, Washington and attends school at Whitworth University. Check out his presence on Facebook and Twitter to stay up on Duality Games updates and the inside scoop on the gaming news you care about.